"Brilliant - fantastic!" Undetectable Viral Load Makes HIV Untransmittable

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fountainhall

"Brilliant - fantastic!" Undetectable Viral Load Makes HIV Untransmittable

Post by fountainhall »

This could be almost unbelievable news for gay men.

Is an end to AIDS really in sight? Prof Alison Rodgers from University College London, the co-leader of a paper recently published in the UK's Lancet medical journal, believes it is.
“It’s brilliant – fantastic. This very much puts this issue to bed."
The lengthy article continues -
An end to the Aids epidemic could be in sight after a landmark study found men whose HIV infection was fully suppressed by antiretroviral drugs had no chance of infecting their partner.

The success of the medicine means that if everyone with HIV were fully treated, there would be no further infections.

. . . Jens Lundgren, a professor of infectious diseases at Rigshospitalet, University of Copenhagen, and joint-lead for the study, called Partner, said: “We have now provided the conclusive scientific evidence for how treatment effectively prevents further sexual transmission of HIV.”

Dr Michael Brady, the medical director at the Terrence Higgins Trust, said: “It is impossible to overstate the importance of these findings.

“The Partner study has given us the confidence to say, without doubt, that people living with HIV who are on effective treatment cannot pass the virus on to their sexual partners. This has incredible impact on the lives of people living with HIV and is a powerful message to address HIV-related stigma.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/201 ... ansmission
odd

Re: "Brilliant - fantastic!" Undetectable Viral Load Makes HIV Untransmittable

Post by odd »

Yes, this is great news. But, and there is always a but, one must not stop taking the required drugs. A very close friend, in Thailand, was given this news at least a year ago and this fact was not explained to him. So after not taking the drugs for 6 months he had all sorts of problems and his viral load shot up. He has been lucky and since re-starting to take the medicine his viral load is nearly down to the 'undetectable' level again. Lesson learned ,I hope!
fountainhall

Re: "Brilliant - fantastic!" Undetectable Viral Load Makes HIV Untransmittable

Post by fountainhall »

Amidst the accolades to the researchers and all the governments and the many charities who have funded research, I hope future generations will never forget how this pandemic ravaged the world, especially the gay population. I suspect like most reading this blog, I lost friends, colleagues and two lovers. Others also lost family members in those horrific early days when diagnosis was a death sentence for all but a handful. Once a test was developed, I was too afraid that the grim reaper was hovering over me. Only in the early days of retroviral drugs did I summon up the courage. I was one of the lucky ones.

Having read so many books on the early years of the HIV AIDS crisis, I still feel anger at the conservatives in the Reagan administration and Reagan himself who first refused to believe their own experts in the Center for Disease Control and then failed to come up with more than a fraction of the budget the CDC requested to fight the epidemic. This was a "gay plague" and gays could look after themselves. Then when it appeared in drug users - well, no-one cared much about them! After all, they represented a small percentage of the population and both groups were responsible for their own lifestyles, weren't they? Even when the virus found its way into the nation's blood supply and haemophiliacs began to be infected in large numbers, Reagan did nothing. He never once mentioned the disease in public speeches until his old friend, the very gay Rock Hudson, appeared on tv looking gaunt and haggard, the result of an aggressive 'flu we were told. After he flew to Paris in a vain attempt to find a cure in mid 1985, Reagan finally made his first mention of AIDS, a one-liner in a press conference. By this time 8,000 had died.

It was only two years later after his conservative Surgeon General had probably gone off the right-wing script and called for general sex education the following year that Reagan called AIDS "public enemy No. 1". I remember arriving in San Francisco from Hong Kong, switching on the television in my hotel and seeing the bearded C. Everett Koop talking to camera about the dangers inherent in rimming! The conservatives in Reagan's cabinet must have been livid!

Those lost years of research almost certainly resulted in tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands more deaths of men, women and children who might otherwise still be alive today. We will never know. And if I point the finger I believe rightfully at Reagan because it was in the USA where AIDS first struck down swathes of young men, I do not forget the lassitude of other governments. In so many parts of the world, precious little was done. I recall visiting a gay sauna in Japan in the early and mid 1980s. Almost all saunas were then closed to non-Japanese around 1987 because it was felt that HIV was a foreign disease. By then the horse had well and truly bolted, though. Besides, other Asians who looked even vaguely Japanese were still permitted entry. in 1984 I flew to Tokyo to attend a joint birthday party for three close friends. There were about 30 crammed into a smallish apartment and we all had a blast, most pairing off and disappearing to other apartments and hotels as the party would down. By 1989 all three birthday boys had died.

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the right-wing Thatcher administration in the UK much more quickly became involved in explanatory and preventive campaigns. Private sector charities like the Terence Highhins Trust started the ball rolling but the government quite quickly followed suit.

But that is all in the past. Let's just pray that many lessons have been learned.
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Re: "Brilliant - fantastic!" Undetectable Viral Load Makes HIV Untransmittable

Post by Captain Kirk »

So how you all feeling about having sex with someone with HIV if he says it's ok I'm taking the medication? I'm not sure I'd be up for risking that just yet.
Jun

Re: "Brilliant - fantastic!" Undetectable Viral Load Makes HIV Untransmittable

Post by Jun »

And then there were the socialist French authorities, who decided to not test blood used in transfusions, as they preferred to wait for a French test to be developed rather than use an existing American one. Negligence is not limited to the right or the left of the political spectrum.

As for the having sex with someone HIV positive, well I always use a condom. I probably wouldn't have sex with someone who I know is HIV positive, but do have sex with what is probably a high risk population & must have had sex with HIV positive people. Some of this is probably irrational.
If they find a HIV cure with low side effects, I might relax behaviour, after considering other STDs of course.
fountainhall

Re: "Brilliant - fantastic!" Undetectable Viral Load Makes HIV Untransmittable

Post by fountainhall »

Jun is absolutely correct. It's easy to forget that there was a major feud between France and the USA as to researchers in which country had actually first discovered the HIV retrovirus - Dr.Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute or Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, USA, Eventually a deal was reached to share the huge royalties accruing from the results of the research. But in 2008 Montagnier and his colleague Dr. Barre Sinousi were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for having in fact been the first to isolate the virus.

Many science and medical commentators at the time felt this was an insult to Gallo and his team. The French had discovered it in samples of white blood cells extracted from the lymph nodes of Frederic Brugiere, a French fashion designer with AIDS, and this was published in the magazine Science (Vol. 220) on 20 May 1983. Gallo's team discovered it a year later. This was published in the same magazine on 4 May 1984 (Vol. 224). Yet in 2008 it had been forgotten that Gallo himself admitted that the virus he and his team had discovered actually came from cultures from Frederic Brugiere which the French had shared with him. A three-year Inquiry by the Federal Office of Research and Integrity set up by the Department of Health and Human Services found no evidence to support Dr. Gallo's claim that he was the original inventor of the widely used diagnostic blood test for AIDS.

The Inquiry leaves little question, however, that Pasteur scientists were first to discover the AIDS virus, to isolate it successfully from several AIDS patients, to describe it in a scientific article, and to use it to make a diagnostic blood test for antibodies to the AIDS virus. All this was reported at length.
After three years of investigations, the Federal Office of Research Integrity today found that Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the American co-discoverer of the cause of AIDS, had committed scientific misconduct. The investigators said he had "falsely reported" a critical fact in the scientific paper of 1984 in which he described isolating the virus that causes AIDS . . .

The report said Dr. Gallo intentionally misled scientific colleagues by saying he had grown an AIDS virus in his laboratory for study and that he had not grown or studied a similar French strain of the virus . . .

While searching for the cause of AIDS, Dr. Gallo had received a sample of a virus being studied by French researchers and had worked extensively with it to extend his own discoveries, the Federal report concluded.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/31/us/f ... virus.html

For those interested a detailed timeline of the AIDS crisis can be found here -

https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview ... s-timeline

Not many come out of it with much glory, apart from the doctors treating the HIV patients and the researchers at various institutes including the CDC. The French certainly were at fault for not testing the nation's blood supply and thereby condemning probably thousands to death, not least haemophiliacs.

In the USA, even after President Reagan had signed an Executive Order to set up the first Presidential Commission on AIDS, as late as 14 October 1987 the Democratic-controlled Senate passed the following resolution
by a 94-2 vote, the U.S. Senate adopted the Helms Amendment , which required federally financed educational materials about AIDS to stress sexual abstinence and forbade any material that “promoted” homosexuality or drug use
For younger readers interested in learning more about those early ghastly, uncertain, confusing years, I wholeheartedly recommend reading Randy Shilts' "And The Band Played On." Don't watch the TV mini-series which condenses it into a fraction of the book. A reporter, Shilts tells it graphically and grimly as it happened. Sadly he himself was to die of AIDS after the book was published.

It is vital that the world learns from the mistakes that were made during the AIDS pandemic. Another virus will no doubt appear with the potential to cause similar panic and death. It was first thought that SARS in 2003 might be the next one. Thankfully, that was controlled with a death toll of under 1,000. But another will appear.
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